Her Doctor Told Her She’d Be Lucky to Run a Mile During Chemo. Instead, She Trained for a Marathon

At first, Melissa Medina thought the pain was just a muscle she had pulled in her chest. It was October 2014, and the 43-year-old mother of two was in the thick of half marathon training, preparing for the Route 66 Half in Tulsa, Oklahoma later in November. When she rolled over in bed that night, she felt it again: a sharp tenderness in her breast.

“I didn’t think anything of it,” Medina, who lives in Edmond, Oklahoma, told Runner’s World. “I was training for a half marathon, for goodness sake! I was healthy.”

When the pain continued the next day, the possibility of breast cancer briefly crossed her mind—she had an aunt who had suffered from the disease—but she figured she was safe, since she had been up-to-date on her mammogram screenings. Still, she checked in with her doctor that day.

Immediately, she was referred to a radiologist to have a mammogram done. It showed something suspicious, so Medina was instructed to get an ultrasound and biopsy of her breast.

“I told them I had to get to class,” said Medina, who works as a pharmacy professor at Oklahoma University. She underwent the procedures, then booked it to her lecture hall. A little while later, the results came in: Medina had stage 0 breast cancer, meaning she had abnormal cells that could potentially grow into cancer.

“After I got the results, I started thinking about getting a mastectomy,” she said.

Learning of a more serious diagnosis

Before preparing for surgery, though, she sent her medical scans to an oncologist friend at Rutgers University for a second opinion. Her friend thought something on the X-ray seemed amiss, and recommended Medina get another biopsy.

The second biopsy showed Medina actually had stage 3 breast cancer. To treat the disease, she would need months of chemotherapy and radiation, along with a mastectomy.

“My husband and I were both shocked,” said Medina, whose husband, also a runner, works as an oncology pharmacist. Her doctors recommended that she start chemotherapy in November, just two weeks before the half marathon. The treatment would continue into the New Year, when Medina was planning to start training for her annual spring marathon in Oklahoma City.

“I wanted to keep working and training,” she said. “I asked them if I could delay the chemotherapy until after the half marathon, but they told me no.

“Then I asked if I could still train for my marathon during the treatment,” Medina continued. “My doctor had this shocked look on his face. He told me I was safe to run, but that I would be lucky to be able to run a mile, let alone 10-mile long runs.”

“I was so worried about how my kids would react when I told them I had cancer,” said Medina, whose daughter was eight and son was four at the time. “Running is a big thing in our family, so I thought that if they saw that I was still training as normal, they wouldn’t worry so much about me.”

Melissa Medina, now cancer-free at 47, runs with her husband and their two children in Edmund, Oklahoma.

Melissa Medina

Training during treatment

Medina’s family and friends wholeheartedly supported her decision to keep running after her diagnosis. That November, she finished the Route 66 Half Marathon in 2:06, just five minutes off her personal best, despite having to run with a painful chemotherapy port (a device that helped doctors access her bloodstream) implanted in her arm. “I couldn’t move my arm much, but my legs felt fine,” she said.

In the weeks that followed, Medina went in for cancer treatment while continuing to teach and run 20 miles per week to prepare for the April marathon. During treatment weeks, she would receive chemo on Thursday, then she’d do her long run with friends on Saturday.

While she kept a tough exterior, Medina admitted that training was extremely tough.

“My legs felt like cinder blocks, ” Medina said. “No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t pick up the pace. My daughter would joke with me that I was running too slow.”

On top of being wiped out from the treatment, she explained that she was anemic during this time, and the decreased hemoglobin levels in her blood left her feeling even more fatigued than usual. “After I ran on Saturdays, all I could do was go home and sit,” she said.

As spring arrived, the Oklahoma City Marathon date neared, as did another event: Medina’s scheduled mastectomy. Originally, she was supposed to have the surgery done earlier in April, but she convinced her doctors to postpone it until two days after the marathon.

“I didn’t want to worry about it,” she said. On race day, Medina powered through the 26.2 miles with a large group of friends and family members. At this point, she had lost all of her hair from chemo, and ran with a baseball cap. She wrapped her chest with Saran wrap to help prevent chafing, which was worsened by the radiation treatment.

Running cancer-free

When Medina crossed the line in 4:38, she was on top of the world. “I felt good running,” she said. “People thought I had lost my mind for doing it. But when people have cancer, they should keep doing whatever it is they love. I didn’t want to just sit and be sad.”

After beating breast cancer earlier in 2015, Melissa Medina and her family ran the Race for the Cure 5K in Oklahoma City.

Melissa Medina

Later in October of 2015, Medina won the cancer survivors’ race at Oklahoma City’s Race for the Cure 5K. Finally cancer-free, she felt strong and capable.

Then, just a couple of months later in December when she was about to start training for the Oklahoma City Marathon again, she was at a doctor’s visit when she received more bad news: She had cancer again. This time, it was of the thyroid.

“I knew what to do this time around,” she said. She got out the baseball hat. Slipped on the running shoes. She put in the marathon training, ran the race, underwent surgery, and beat the cancer. And throughout it all, she never lost her love for the sport.

“I really believe running helped me through it,” said Medina, who’s now 47 and cancer-free. This past October, she won the Race for the Cure 5K for the fourth year in a row, running 24:13.

“People are scared to talk to you when you have cancer, but running gave me something to talk about. I wasn’t isolated. And it made me feel stronger and more confident that I could keep fighting.”

Hailey MiddlebrookDigital EditorHailey first got hooked on running news as an intern with Running Times, and now she reports on elite runners and cyclists, feel-good stories, and training pieces for Runner's World and Bicycling magazines.

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